I am still pretty new to SE, but across the SE websites, it seems a lot of people with very high reputation and moderator capabilities enter a lot of faulty code... but the code is only faulty by a misspelling or a closing bracket or something pretty simple, that a complete noob may not be able to pick up on, but someone slightly more advanced would.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I have to ask - Is this intentional? Are Mods trying to passive aggressively "teach a lesson" to noobs? Or maybe I'm off and there really are that many subtle errors from the experts...

A vote down on this question... Nice... Does that mean I should vote down any answer that I don't believe? Because at least one of the answers is from a person who ALWAYS leaves passive aggressive answers.
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Travis PflanzApr 20 '12 at 15:59

3

A downvote in meta is simply a statement of disagreement with the premise of the question. You're taking offense at a downvote, when the very premise of your question is offensive to the good-faith efforts of the volunteers who contribute to WPSE.
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Chip BennettApr 20 '12 at 16:50

My point exactly... I am asking if I should take offense to the vote, since others have to the question.
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Travis PflanzApr 20 '12 at 16:54

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It's only human nature to take offense to a downvote to a question or answer, in meta or WPSE proper. It's a gut emotional response to a perceived slight. I especially dislike downvoting answers, for this very reason. But it is important to remember (and this is something I have to remind myself, also) that a downvote is simply a tool, not a moral valuation. It is important, for community vetting of questions and answers, to use these tools (especially for answers that may not only be wrong, but harmful).
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Chip BennettApr 20 '12 at 17:10

On Meta, up/down votes are more a way to demonstrate agreement/disagreement with a question or answer ... not whether or not you "believe" the statement. That's an entirely different issue and really is best handled privately.
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EAMann♦Apr 20 '12 at 19:36

6 Answers
6

For example I found code that did everything I neede dit ot for an answer on Net tuts. I assumed since there were comments pointing out flaws and syntax errors followed by "thanks I updated the post" and that it was severla months old, that it would be fixed. This was not the case.

It can be embarassing and damaging, and it's not desirable but it does happen, much to our displeasure

The majority of the time, our answers incorporate or call custom code or functions listed in a question or a pastebin. Much of the rest of the time, we just check the source of a referenced plugin in the repository or on GitHub and write our code recommendations on the fly.

This means that, while the code is empirically sound, we probably haven't had the time to test it on a server - this is almost always the case when writing a response to a custom function that we just don't have on our server.

It's impossible to test code that references custom DB tables or other custom functions that we don't have. So the typos you see are just that, typos. If they're obvious, either make an edit yourself or leave a comment and they'll get fixed eventually.

I can say that, personally, I write the VAST majority of my answer directly into the answer box...as in I don't even open an IDE to write them, let alone test them on a server (local or otherwise). I try to mention as such when I do that, but it doesn't always come to mind. At the end of the day, the guys who are here with high rep like @ChipBennet, @toscho, @EAMann, and @Rarst (just to name a few) are not here (primarily at least) to help out the other high rep users and be in a chummy club with them, they are here to help out the new guys and improve the community...the chumminess just sorta comes with that.